On this episode of the Note Closers Show Podcast, Scott discusses the fact that once you embrace the suck, embrace that you are going to suck at things at first, then you are ready to achieve success.
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Embrace the Suck
One of the biggest things that Monday happens is it’s the start of the week. Sometimes it’s the start of the month. Sometimes it’s the start of the quarter. Sometimes it’s the start of your year. I always like to ask what are you going to do today to make your week, your month, your quarter, your year successful? Many people are like, “I’ll just wait until the start of January to do anything,” and you’re already behind the eight ball. You’re already failing at what you want to accomplish because today marks a new day to get things done. There is one quote that I love more than anything else out there. It’s that, “Those that are successful are the ones that embrace the suck early and often.” It sounds dirty, but what I’m trying to get at is you have to realize that if you’re going to grow as an entrepreneur, as a real estate investor, as a capital raiser, as a marketer, whatever it is, you’ve got to be pushing the envelope in getting outside of your comfort level, #embracethesuck.
Embrace the Suck: We see people struggle with marketing. We see people who struggle with things before, during and after.
We just had a a couple of our new Mastermind and Fast Track students. One of the biggest things that we see coming from the Fast Track and also recently coming from our most recent Note CAMP convention we had with over a thousand viewers, is one of the biggest weaknesses is the marketing side. It’s seen a lack of response. We see people struggle with marketing. We see people who struggle with things before, during and after. We had a new Fast Track student. He’d come from a trucking industry before. Started a trucking company, built it up, sold it off, made money, now he is ready to do something different. We’re talking about a little bit different. His first time out driving, he was all bare-knuckled, scared to death of driving that big semi. Very normal. The first time I got in the car and took a long trip in my car right out of high school, I was scared going off to college, white-knuckled.
Many people, many investors, often struggle with that white-knuckle fear of like, “Oh crap, oh shit, I’ve got to do something now.” What happens is we find excuses to avoid doing the things that we know we need to be doing. I’ve talked in the past before about the big rock there. You get your big rocks done first, you get your medium-sized rocks done, you get down, and all the little things that just flop around that fit into the cracks of the day. Most people spend time focused on the small little things and they never get around to the big things. When you are an entrepreneur, and we are all entrepreneurs, we’re all sales people, whether you believe it or not, you’re selling yourself on your deal. You’re selling yourself and your services. We are all in sales. Nobody can tell me otherwise, unless you’re confined to a jail cell and you’re a guy that basically got the cops, you’re still in sales. Everybody is selling something. You’re either selling your expertise, selling yourself as a note investor, whether you’re brand new or experienced. If you’re brand new, you don’t sell yourself, you sell your network. You sell your team that surrounds you. The biggest thing that I see people failing on is just simply taking basic actions in Marketing 101.
I always can tell who’s going to be successful after a workshop, after a conference, by one simple thing: send out the first email. We make it very easy for people to get a database of those that are going to the workshops with us. Lot of times we actually give them the database. I’m always amazed to see the lack of emails that follow an event, because that’s the first thing, “I got your information. I took the time to take your email or your name, your phone number, and wherever I pulled it off, whether it’s off the Base Camp or your business card or Scott sent me a list. I took the time to literally upload that to MailChimp, Infusionsoft, something and I took the time to write an email, not just via Google, like Gmail or through Yahoo. I literally upload it through something of service, a customer or client relationship manager. I want to manage these relationships because I’m going to build more relationships. I’m going to market more to build relationships. I’m going to send an email out to that database and I’m going to literally say this is me.”
On average, we probably see less than 10% of people actually do this. That’s the first big thing that people suck at. What it comes down to, a lot of people, “I’m going to go to MailChimp and create an account. I’m going to go to Infusionsoft and sign up for an account,” but they don’t do anything to complete. We’ve talked about the theory of unfinished bridges. That’s the first major bridge that most people have to do. “I can just send an email here via Gmail and be have it done in ten seconds, but now I got to spend an hour to go into MailChimp. I’ve got to upload my logo and might actually have to make it look clean. I’ve got to format it properly. I’ve got to pick out colors. It’s like I’ve got to rehab my email.” It’s flip or flop. People just take that as, “I want to do something else. I’m going to go watch NFL. I’m going to go watch Flip This House. I’m going to go to the mall.” Marketing is the most important thing and your email, communication, honestly, is the number one thing. The sooner that you embrace that suckage, just pony up and just take a big whiff of it and realize your first email is going to blow but at least you get an email out, you get better at it.
Ninety percent of learning is going to come from that first hour, two hours of sending out an email blast. I’ve talked to people who’ve been around for years now in the WCN family, the WCN crew, and I think I’ve maybe seen them send one email out in twelve months. One email and they’ve been to three or four workshops. I know they’ve got a thousand connections on LinkedIn or they’ve got 100 or 200 plus asset managers. Collecting people’s name is great but it doesn’t do you any good unless you’re actually communicating. You’ve got to talk to somebody. You’ve got to reach out and go. You’ve got to share some mortgage. You’ve got to go out and go share something.
Embrace the Suck: If you’re in business, you’ve got to do one or two things: either track and find deals or find capital.
There are four things every real estate entrepreneur can be sharing something on a weekly basis, ” I got to talk to people weekly?” Yeah. You’re in business, aren’t you? If you’re not in business, then go something else. Go save your money, seriously. If you’re in business, you’ve got to do one or two things: either track and find deals or find capital. That’s honestly everybody out in the world is out there selling you something; from McDonald’s trying to slap you with a Happy Meal to Tesla trying to sell a car, or Seiko trying to sell you a watch, or Polo trying to sell you a T-shirt, or Nike trying to sell you shoes. They’re communicating. A lot of them are communicating via TV and things like that. Many of you aren’t even doing the basic thing that everybody can do as simple as send an email. That’s how we communicate these days. Your phone is today’s television.
So many people won’t even send an email out to their database. That just drives me bonkers because email has a 4,400% ROI on every dollar you spend as long as you use it. I see people that send one email out and that’s it. They never follow up with a second, a third, a fourth email. You should be at least getting four emails out in four weeks. What are you going to talk about? One, ” Hi, hello. This is me. I’ve been a dentist for thirty years, but you did not know I was an active real estate investor for the last ten or I was a truck driver for twelve or I was a veterinarian or I was in car sales but many people did not know this.” That’s the first email. It’s your shot across the bow to let your database know that you’re out there, “Hi, I’m out here. I’m just not another face in the crowd hiding behind everybody.” What I’m getting at is that’s the first thing, “Hi. Hello. How are you? Here’s my company. Here’s my smiling face.”
The second thing that you can email about is what your focus is. Maybe you’re making offers on some deals. Maybe you got a picture of a property you’re looking at online. If you’re looking at a tape of assets, you can always print to screen and save a picture of the house and then send it out on your email, “Here’s the deal that I’m working on.” That’s what’s great is that shows you you’re actually taking action when 90% of people are too scared to get out of their own way.
Third time, maybe you invite people out to your local REIA club meeting or to a Meetup maybe or to a holiday party, or for a cup of coffee, or to the Quest IRA event or whatever. That’s the beautiful thing about this time of year is there are a lot of events going on. There are a lot of great things to get out and network, whether you’re in your local Meetup group or you’re starting a Meetup group or you’re going to a big event like I’m going to one in Houston; there’s supposed to be 300, 400 people at. What I’m trying to get at is there are simple things you can do with those emails.
The fourth one could be, as Gary Vaynerchuck like to say, “Jab, jab, jab, right hook,” to provide content. “Here’s what I’m doing. Here’s the deal we’re working on. Here’s an event I want to invite you to. Do you want to do a deal with me?” It gives the fourth email, that fourth post, without asking for anything then you’re going to have people to take notice. Sending one email, “Fund my deal,” does not work. That’s like saying, “Let’s get married. We’re on our first date, let’s get married. Let’s start naming our kids.” Psycho.
Forty emails is good but if we had 416 somewhat people that were actually live registered, I know I’ve gotten maybe six or seven, I’ve been counting them, it downright depresses me. I see people posting on Facebook, everybody loves Facebook, “Here’s an image. Scott’s head on a robot. Here is The Jerk, Steve Martin. Here’s a variety of things.” I’m not picking on anybody personally, but I don’t see emails. Some people are like, “What the hell am I going to talk about? It’s the same shit you’re talking about in Facebook. Here’s what we’re focused on. Here’s the event that we went to.” I love the fact like Donovan said, “Great, you invited people out to the Meetup group last week in here, about thirteen to fourteen people do it.” You send an email out to your database and say, “We had our Houston Meetup group. Last time, we had fourteen, fifteen people show up. Our next one is this date. Put it on your calendar.” You have to literally, especially these last two months of the year, really schedule things in effective manner because we are two months out from basically Christmas Eve.
Embrace the Suck: That first hour to two hours you spend on your first email, it should be the longest time that you spend on it.
What comes? You have Halloween parties, you have Trick or Treat. You have Christmas parties, you have New Year’s Eve parties, you have family get-togethers. Wouldn’t you rather have something that you talked about, something you’ve emailed and communicated to people to invite them to things? They’re going to a Christmas party, “There’s Fright Night at Quest IRA this Thursday night. Come on out and network with me. You can come hide behind the mask if you want to,” whatever. What I’m trying to get at is that first hour to two hours you spend on your first email, it should be the longest time that you spend on it. After that, it gets considerably easier and you suck less. Are you going to miss things the first time you email out? Yes. The reason you go ahead and do that now though is so you can F-up, so when you really need something later on and down the road, it’s better. You’re doing much better. You have to realize those things. Creating a business card is great but you’re still missing the point if you’re not out networking people, you’re not emailing your database. Who doesn’t want to speak from one person to a thousand versus one-on-one conversation? One-on-one conversations are great when you’re not networking. I get it, but if you’re not going to send an email out to your database, I’m downright disappointed in people when I talk to them.
We did a live Q&A. The first question I asked a lot of people was, “When was the last time you sent out an email to your database?” They said June. June’s a lifetime ago. You’re more worried about your business card? No, focus on getting an email out to your database. If you’re trying to put a meet-up together, if you’re trying to attract investors, if you’re trying to get more capital raised for deals, you’ve got to send out an email. Some of the people that are really awesome at it are doing tremendous jobs. Stacy Walsh sends a regular update out on what he’s doing. Cody Cox sends a regular update about what he’s doing on. Katie Moton has been sending out some phenomenal emails for her and Chris. Chris is overseas and she’s got two kids. Katie’s got all the excuses in the world not to do something, but she still does.
We bombard you with a lot of emails on a regular basis because that’s what we’re doing. We’re sharing what’s going on. You’re not going to beat me at my own game. You’re not going to out-market Scott Carson. What you have to do is you have to out-market your lazy ass. You have to out-market yourself from a week ago, a day ago, a month ago. A lot of people just choose instead of erasing the suck, they live the suck. They just don’t do it. They don’t care. Until you get uncomfortable with your existing situation whether in money, lack of deals, lack of experience and you just keep putting money after something, I’m sorry. Until you get uncomfortable with where you’re at and start doing things, you’re better off.
The beautiful thing is you can start today. You can change how you do things today. You can start actually taking action versus sitting with your thumb up your butt just sitting there not doing anything, or sitting there sucking on your thumb like scared to death, “What am I going to say now? Is somebody going to actually know who I am?” Yeah, they are. If you only send one email out and never follow up, they might have known you. They might have been that strangers in the night exchanging glances, exchange that glance with you in an email, “That was interesting. Where’s more content?” You just sat there and took a big old nasty ugly turd and didn’t do anything. This is why scheduling something on a regular basis that get out is the most important thing. This is why I started sending email out every Sunday night to my database to get them to come to a thing Monday night. We’re also sending out another email Monday morning to another database, a chunk of investors and there are some crossovers on this list, to get them to sign up for Monday night.
There is a huge method to my crazy madness. Everything is connected in what we do. I’m really excited to share that conspiracy theory, how everything is connected. I’m really stoked about that because people just think that, “I’ll just an email out once. I’ll just post something once here and there.” You might get somebody. A broken clock is right twice a day. If you keep doing things and you have to realize you’re going to get less sucky the second time you do it. The third time, it’s going to be even less suckier. The fourth time might actually be okay. It might actually be good. The fifth time, people are actually starting to take action, “They’re doing this on a regular basis. They did it once a week. I’ve noticed a change in Chris or Katie or Cody or Stacy,” or whoever you are out there. If you don’t send an email out to your database, you don’t do anything, you aren’t in business. You’re just a social wannabe. Forget the business cards. Forget the social media profiles. Don’t get me wrong, you can talk to people on social media and stuff like that. Put your huevos out there and send an email out to your database. Then that’s a real conversation that’s you and nobody else.
We have a question, “We’re just getting started, only sending out one email a week. What’s the best time to send it out?”
It depends how big your database is. If you’re using a tool like MailChimp, it will tell you the best time to send it out. If you send it out to your warm database, there are a couple of times you should send it out actually. I’m a big believer that Sunday night emails at 7:00 at night get opened really well. A large portion of people, 70% of people, spend time on their phone looking at their messages and social media while they’re lying in bed. One of our biggest open rates is 7:00 Sunday night.
Embrace the Suck: Send it out right around noon because people are wasting time before they go to lunch.
Another time to send it out if you’re going to send out during the weekdays, send it out right around noon because people are wasting time before they go to lunch, or you send it at 4:00 in the afternoon. If you use MailChimp and once you upload the list, oftentimes you can do something called Timewarp or it will allow for MailChimp to pick the optimal time to send out. Like me, I have a database that’s all across the country. We try to send things out that hit everybody at 11 AM in their time zone, if it’s an optimal time, great, for time zones. Other times we send it out just at 11:00 our time, which is different. The more segment you’re going to have, East Coast, West Coast, Central, Mountain Time, and stuff like that, the better but MailChimp has a cool thing called Timewarp that you set it up prior to 24 hours. Like if you were going to try to send it out Sunday night at 7:00, you would need to write it by Saturday at 7 PM to be able for MailChimp to go out there and identify those time zones and send it out individually. That’s the beautiful thing, just send the damn thing out. If you send it out at Tuesday at 11:00, then send it out Thursday at 4:00 to those who didn’t open the email the first time.
Communicate because not everybody is on your schedule. Not everybody is sitting there patiently waiting, unnerved, waiting for Donovan or somebody else to send them an email. “I’m waiting for your email. I’m waiting by the phone. Please call me. Please email me. ” You have to literally send it out, “He or she is actually doing something. This is interesting.” You’re only going to get about 2% response rate the first time you send an email out the first time, so you have to build that response rate. You have to build it up. You have to get people to notice you. That’s the most important thing, just do it and do it again and again and again. Get in the habit of doing it.
Going in and networking all the time is great. If you don’t ever have any time to send an email out to the people as a follow-up thing of people you met at a Quest event or a Meetup group or an IRA club meeting or a networking event, you just really failed at being able to follow back up with people. It’s important because honestly for us to get people to a Monday night webinar, we probably send sometimes or repost things five to eight times. On a Monday night 7:00, I’ll have a reminder email that goes out at 6 PM. I’ll do a Facebook Live roughly about an hour out before 2 PM, that’s the second piece of reminder. I’ve got email going out at 11 AM to a big group. I had email go out last night 7:00. I posted something on social media, on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram, all on Fridays or Saturdays. The least effective time to post some emails or something on Friday night, but sending out the rest of the week is great. Now I have seven, eight things for just one event thing. We’ll record it, we’ll have a video, we’ll upload it to YouTube, Vimeo. We’ll have something that works 24 hours a day, seven days a week for people to catch the replay. We want people live. To get 300, 400, 500 people live, you’ve got to hit them smart-wise.
The first webinars I did, I sent emails out. I maybe had ten people on it. Ten people is not that exciting, but ten people is better than no people. Having one person read your email the first time or say something is better than no people. Depending on how good you are at marketing and how you like to tow the line, you may have some ugly people out there who respond. One of my favorite emails is also the ones that I’ve got the most hate mail from, Fifty Shades of Notes. When I talk about, “Do you feel like you’re a bald guy when you’re talking to borrowers? Do your dead beat borrowers need a good spanking?” It was funny but some people took offense to it, so I had several people email me ugly things, which is okay. Thank you for unsubscribing. I don’t need you in my life.
That’s the beautiful thing about emails, you absolutely get lovers but you’ll get some haters, and that’s okay. You’ll have stalkers. You’ll have people that will look at what you’re doing and then, ” I’m going to duplicate that.” Imitation in this game is the purest form of flattery because a lot of people aren’t original. A lot of people have no original thoughts, they just have to steal and copy. That’s okay, let them try to do that. They’re not going to do a better job than you because you’re going to be emails and weeks and months and sometimes years ahead of the copycatters. Eventually, if they can’t come up with something original on their own, they’re not going to be in business long. If they fail to embrace the suckage and just embrace the stealage, stealage does not work long-term.
I found that a lot of our investors have been using MailChimp to post to Facebook their emails. If they are mainly just posting to Facebook, they can just use MailChimp and put everything out there.
That’s a great key thing that MailChimp offers, that you can go automatically post to Facebook, you can automatically post to Twitter, automatically tweet it for you, which is great features. I still think it’s better than nothing, let’s give them that. It’s better than nothing because it gives them an opportunity to click on stuff. One of the things that would be smart to do if you do post straight to Facebook is you probably want to go in the comments section and say, “If you like my webinar or like my thing, make sure to click here to opt in.” You might even want to do that in your email that you send out, put in a little thing, “Get on my list,” and to pull up a little image. You can go straight into MailChimp or any of your things and create a customized link for people to opt in, so do that, get on the list. Get out your investor’s list. Refer to a friend. You’re probably thinking, ” If they’re on your email list, aren’t they already on there?” Yeah. Unless you share on Facebook or shared on something that goes out across the board where people aren’t seen, it’s the general public, so post it there. It’s a little trick to make things happen.
Embrace the Suck: One thing to keep in mind is all the real estate stuff, has about a 17% to 20% open rate.
Eventually, you’re going to have open rates that go up. I’m thinking that one thing to keep in mind is real estate entrepreneurs, real estate industry and mortgage bankers, all these real estate stuff, has about a 17% to 20% open rate. Many of you will have a higher open rate when you have a smaller list. The more you grow your list over time that will become much more apparent and give you around the 17% open rate. If you’ve got a thousand people in your database, that means you only have 170 people that actually opened it the first time through. That’s why you need to send it a second time, and then you’ll often get another 6% to 10%, 6% to 12% open rates depending on the time that you send it out. Sometimes, you may want to send the third time out, one last time for those that didn’t open up to get an additional 3% to 5%. If you add those up, 3%, 7%, 20%, you now went from a 17% to 20% open rate to over 30% to 40% open rate, depending on who you’re doing. Now you’re communicating. Now you’re cooking with Crisco. Now you’re no longer sucking, you’re doing actually a great job with something.
We have a question, “Do you have a higher open rate with Infusionsoft or MailChimp? Does a program make a difference?”
Yes, a program does make a difference. What we have done in the past when we got started off, we just used MailChimp because it was cheap and I didn’t have a big database. One of the things that I like about Infusionsoft is I have a big database now. It allows me to literally carve out pieces, carve out sections of my database a lot more effective than it does with MailChimp. In MailChimp, I upload a thousand contacts or 400 people from my virtual workshop and another 400 people from another virtual workshop. Even though it may have some crossover, they count each list as a contact, I get double charged basically. With Infusionsoft, it’s one contact and as long as I merge contacts, I can tag people in there. I have some people who have 80 tags because they fall on a variety of things. A, they went to my virtual workshop, B, they went to Note CAMP, C, they’re in California, they’ve got five states that they like the most, or their birthday is such and such date. If it’s one person and they got all these different tags, if I decide I get one, I get a tag, they pull up out of that tag. It saves me a lot of money. It also allows me to really slice and dice and hit the niches in my database instead of one broad thing.
One of the biggest mistakes I did earlier on is I went broad and didn’t really focus. Everybody is in there when I should have gone ahead and collected more information from my friends. My open rates are better in Infusionsoft than they are in MailChimp. MailChimp if it’s a smaller list initially, you might get a pretty decent rate and you can do some cool tracking stuff in there. Infusionsoft, if you can put that to work. Who would not want to have a Cutlass versus a Ferrari.
Another question, “We’ve surpassed our mail limit on MailChimp with mail contacts. I’m curious of the price comparison between MailChimp and Infusionsoft. What is the better deal compared to quality of service?”
Hands down, MailChimp. If you’re beyond your contact place on MailChimp, then you’re not being able to communicate effectively. Hands down, going to Infusionsoft is going to be a better bang for your buck. Actually, we have Darin Adams coming on to talk about the three little words: attract, sell and wow. If you have a bigger database, you need Infusionsoft. It’s what you need for it. Unless you’re talking about just having 2,000 free contacts, it’s time to pony up and start paying for it. If you’re trying just to limit sending to that 2,000, $35, $50 a month, you’ve got to do that being in business. Trust me, if you use it regularly, it will more than pay for itself. How many JV partners do you need to really fund your whole email campaign for a year? The answer is uno, one, uno mas. One person to say they want to partner with you to get things done. Honestly, the thing that Darin’s talking about is just mind-blowing crazy to what Infusionsoft is offering. It is like having a Ferrari sometimes to get across town, but damn you’ve got to run across town fast if you can actually spend enough time to learn how to drive with a shift stick.
Embrace the suck. Eric, the brother of Jen, my buddy here who helped out for a few hours, you struggled with your email campaign the first time you did it, right?
Yes, I did.
How long did it take you to do your first email blast?
About two hours.
Then you get it and it was a lot easier replicating and you went for it, right?
Correct. Now, it’s time to get back into it.
Embrace the Suck: Spend the time, marketing 101, get your email out.
You’re all going to fall off. There are times I go radio silent the emails because I’m on vacation, I’m chilling. There’s also times where I am like I am chilling but the stuff’s set up to automatically do it. That’s the beautiful thing if you have a busy schedule, spend time at night, set up your email campaigns, and pre-schedule them to go out when you are in a busy time. Whether you’re travelling on a plane or on vacation or working and don’t have the time to write something. Spend the time, marketing 101, get your email out; most important thing you can do and it’s the biggest bang for your buck to help you find success.
Go and instead maybe of saying #embracethesuck, #embracesuccess. I’ll leave you with that little nugget, #embracesuccess.
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